Social media marketing and website quality relationship: a brief note

I refer to Kim and Stoel (2004) on the various attributes of website quality in retail business to start off my discussion. These writers provide a comprehensive list of quality attributes, namely,

1. information fit-to-task
2. tailored communication
3. online completeness
4. relative advantage
5. visual appeal
6. innovativeness
7. emotional appeal
8. consistent image
9. ease of understanding
10. intuitive operations
11. response time
12. trust

When a company conducts marketing and sales activities in the social media ecosystem, these activities could be studied in terms of further contribution to some of the website quality attribures provided. More empirical studies need to be carried for this purpose. It appears to me that social media marketing can contribute to (2), (7), (9) and (12). There are 2 other factors to consider:

1. The social media ecosystem tends to favour more marketing 3.0 approach as well as more social enterprise-behaviour in commercial enterprises. This effect will in turn influence the social medica marketing approach adopted by companies.
2. Website qaulity is affected by the 3 main considerations in a typical user and task analysis, namely, user, task and the specific environment involved. I want to point out that, website presentation in a smartphone is different from that of a PC tablet, and which, in turn, is different from that of a desktop PC. These are 3 different environments; user profiles and main task profiles are also different in these 3 computing environments. Thus, the priorities of website quality attributes in these 3 cases also differ.

Ultimately, it is important to ask how a corporate website contributes to the marketing effectiveness of an enterprise, not just its social media marketing effectiveness.

References

1. Kim, S. and Stoel, L. (2004) "Dimensional hierarchy of retail website quality", Information & Management, 41, pp. 619-633.
2. Kotler, P., Kartajaya, H., and Setiawan, I. (2010) Marketing 3.0, John Wiley and Sons.
3. Social media marketing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_marketing
4. User and task analysis: http://old.sigchi.org/bulletin/1999.3/pubs.pdf
5. Web usability: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_usability